Caring for the Soul of the Country

The sound of the digeridu, or Yidaki as it's known in North East Arnhem Land, has been adopted as a symbolic part of Australian culture.

But how well do non-Indigenous Australians understand the spirituality of traditional Aboriginal music and its centrality to wellbeing?

This Encounter travels from Darwin to North East Arnhem Land to attend the 10th Garma Festival of Traditional Culture. Held in Yolgnu country on the Gove Peninsula, it draws together over 1,000 people to watch, perform and celebrate traditional culture.

Caring for the Soul of the Country examines the idea of cultural practice as central to wellbeing -- spiritual, social and physical.

It looks in particular at ceremony -- a sacred crucible of the broader practice of 'caring for country' -- as vaccination against illness of the spirit and of the body.

And it asks if a clearer understanding of the centrality of 'caring for country' might affect government policy on social provisions for Aboriginal communities.

Note: The music in this program was performed by singers from the Gumatj, Maugn, Anindilyakwa and Kuninjku clans.

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Transcript

Gretchen Miller: What would happen if people stopped singing and dancing?

Mandawuy Yunupingu: It would mean we wouldn't have any basis to live. Nothing like this would be relevant. And that's why we would be nothing.

Gretchen Miller: Hello, I'm Gretchen Miller and welcome to Encounter, on ABC Radio National. In the program today we're travelling from Darwin to Northeast Arnhem Land, to attend the 10th Garma Festival of Traditional Culture, held in Yolgnu country on the Gove Peninsula. We'll be talking to people there about Aboriginal ceremonial practices and their interconnectedness with spiritual, social and individual health and wellbeing.

Djapirri Mununggirritj: The way I see it, ceremony is a medicine to the soul, the inner being of a Yolgnu person, and in a time of person going through...very sick, for instance, that person will need that particular instance of comfort in times of need.

Gretchen Miller: It ties in with a bigger caring for country practice. Where does ceremony sit in that larger practice of caring for country?

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi : It's all one thing; the land is sung in the song lines. And the song lines, like, a big picture where you see yourself walking on the land, when it's being sung by the men and the dancers, the actions of everything, like the birds and the animals is danced. The song is telling a story of where it is and how you travel to the land through the sky or the sea or the land.

Gretchen Miller: The notion that something as esoteric and spiritual as ceremony can have tangible health benefits has yet to be embraced by the political mainstream. It is just over a year since the former Howard government launched the Northern Territory intervention, focussing on the safety and wellbeing of Aboriginal children. While there's still passionate debate over the appropriateness of the intervention, the spotlight has been on the practicalities of health checks, nutrition, and reducing access to alcohol.

But as we just heard from Yolgnu traditional owners, Mandawuy Yunupingu, Djapirri Mununggirritj and Dhanggal Gurruwiwi, Aboriginal people see cultural practices as central to wellbeing. Ceremony is a sacred crucible of the broader practice of caring for country. It's like a vaccination against illness of the spirit and of the body. It protects, in both esoteric and pragmatic ways, Aboriginal existence on the earth.

In this program we'll unfold the reasons why this is so. We'll discuss some medical evidence and see how cultural practice may have a much larger role to play in addressing the chronic physical and social ill health plaguing many Aboriginal communities.

Mark Grose: Music is one of the few things in the remote Aboriginal communities in Northern Australia that can stop just about every form of anti-social behaviour.

Mark Grose: The things that have power in communities is football, music and cultural practice. Those things can focus those whole communities on positive activity. And it seems that governments and all sorts of organisations that work with Aboriginal communities are searching for exactly that key, but no one uses those keys, for whatever reason, they see music as a hobby or football as just something interesting to do on the weekend. And they continually struggle to find a key to actually get a message to people or get through to people or empower people, and for us it's really logical, it's right here in front of us all.

Gretchen Miller: For several hours each afternoon Witiyana Marika interprets the stories being sung and danced by different clans, gathered around the bungul ground at the Garma site at Gulkula.

Ceremony can happen anywhere, but always refers intimately to the very specific 'country' or homeland of the performers. Homelands are usually accessed through outstations which are at some distance from towns. But what is a homeland? Dean Yibarbuk, traditional owner of country around Kabulwarnamyo, on the central Arnhem Land plateau, operates Warddeken Land Management. He also does health research with Charles Darwin University.

Dean Yibarbuk: It's a home, the land that's been inherited through our generations, grandfathers and grandfathers, been passed on from that generation up until now. The land in...each clan group owns a particular estate. When we've been drawn to a major town or European-made settlement, we've left the country sitting there by itself, waiting for its people to return. Old people became diasporas that particular time. Some areas, we're getting people to come back to homelands and to participate, for the time being, until further down the track people will feel that they belong to that country, because they know it's self...

Gretchen Miller: It's usually the towns acting as service providers to outstations that see the most social and health problems. Mortality and rates of disease are up to seven times higher for Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal Australians. Heart disease, diabetes, depression and alcoholism are found around centres where there is little work, no activities for teenagers, and usually a pub or club open for long hours. Towns are sometimes 'on country', but the lifestyle can be sedentary, separate from the bush, and ceremonial practice and caring for country becomes sporadic.

Allan Marett: Just being on country and living the sort of lifestyle that people are, going out hunting, going out foraging, having to work to just get the material, the wherewithal to sustain the ceremony is important, and it really gives people a purpose, whereas sitting round in the community unemployed for year after year doesn't really give people any sense of purpose.

So what often happens is you see young men who are fairly lethargic around town just come to life when they come out in country and suddenly become very, very hard-working. Exactly what it is is difficult because there are so many different facets, but I would have said that the sort of things you'd be looking at would be things like proximity to the ancestors, the fact that you're there in the place where your forebears were, so you have a connection to tradition and you have a direct contact with those ancestors and those sources. You have a connection to places that are powerful, and when you've been to powerful places with Aboriginal people, there's no mistake about the way in which the country electrifies people.

Gretchen Miller: That's Allan Marett, Professor of Ethnomusicology, School of Indigenous Knowledge Systems at Charles Darwin University. I asked him how ceremonial song demonstrates the depth of connection between country and people, and he told me of an area where the music is still being born out of country and given to songmen in dreams by the ancestors. Like the lirrga that comes from country around Wadeye or Port Keats, south-west of Darwin.

Allan Marett: Most of the lirrga are given to songmen by a pair of mermaids, an old one with white hair and a young one with dark hair. And they live in the billabong around Wudipuli and Nama, which is where most of that family lives.

Gretchen Miller: And what's the general subject matter?

Allan Marett: It's to do with things that are around that area, about the billabong, about the mermaids themselves, about the waterlilies, about the mosquitoes that live in the swamp, about the paperbarks, about the birds. Of course people are born out of country in the literal sense that their essence, if you like, comes out of a particular ancestral place where power had been deposited at the beginning of time in the creative period. And those places are frequently waterholes, people are born out of waterholes, and people can tell you where they came from, and where they came from also determines what they are, whether they are a crocodile or whether they're a turtle. And that's a fundamental aspect of being.

Gretchen Miller: So the songs help maintain that connection between people, the dead, and the sentient landscape?

Allan Marett: Yes, people are always born out of the country they're living in.

Tom Calma: Hi, I'm Tom Calma, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and National Race Discrimination Commissioner with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. I'm an Indigenous person from the Northern Territory, from my father's side, he's Iwaidja and that's on Coburg Peninsula which is just north of Kakadu National Park. And my mother is Kungarakan and that's just south west of Darwin. It borders on with the Larrakia who are the traditional owners for Darwin. So our country goes from the Territory wildlife park at Berry Springs, through Litchfield National Park, Batchelor, to Adelaide River.

Gretchen Miller: What about for you in your childhood, did you have much ceremony?

Tom Calma: We did. I'm very lucky that from my mother's side it was within 100 kilometres of Darwin at probably the furtherest point or just over, and so we were able to maintain a close relationship with family who are still living on the land. I must say that a lot of our traditional lands had been taken up through pastoral or agricultural leases or other arrangements, but we did have access, and we've got greater access now that we won a fair bit of land back through the Finniss River land claim. So I was very fortunate in being able to experience that, but unfortunately a lot of our ceremonies now are relating to the passing of someone within the family, and that's not good, that's very sad.

Gretchen Miller: Are you a knowledge man? Are you a singing man or a dancing man?

Tom Calma: No, I do have knowledge. But it's interesting because a lot of our older people...in the early 1900s there was a big ceremony and at that ceremony at Adelaide River there was a poisoning, strychnine put into the flour which then killed many of our elders, and that lost a lot of our dance. It was arsenic or strychnine. It's more likely to be arsenic because it's the arsenic that was used to poison crocodiles and somehow that found its way into the flour, and that took a great toll of both men and women in those ceremonies.

We went through a couple of generations where it was quite a hard time for all of us, and then when, less than a decade ago, some of our older men, and they were very old, they were in their 80s and they were the senior custodians of the songs and dances died. And what was even sadder was when the next generation down who were also the carriers of the songs and language also passed, so we lost almost two generations of people within a fairly close period of time.

It was just the diseases of diabetes, that particular disease. We lost a couple through cardiovascular disease, and things like smoking, like drinking, like poor diet are major contributors. So we're going through a period now where we're doing a bit of a cultural survival and revival within our group. We still know the stories that are there and we still practice them, we still share them. What we are lacking are the people who know the songs. And when you lose people quickly, there's not that opportunity for transition.

Gretchen Miller: Ceremony's centrality to Aboriginal life goes well beyond entertainment, deep into the social and spiritual structures of society. Musicologist Allan Marett has spent 30 years working closely with traditional owners from around the top end.

Allan Marett: Well, I think that one of the things that you need to understand about ceremony is that in a lot of ways it is the law, it is the library, it's the bank, it's the place where really central things get transacted. So when I say it's the law, it is about expressing and enacting the way that people should behave. When I say that it's the library, in an oral culture it's the place where the key elements of wisdom and learning are brought out and passed on, and people are reminded of them in a very physical sort of way. They're not words on a page, you actually do it with your body and you do it with your voice, and that process really sustains knowledge and culture, what the important things are. And these important things are to do with what we are, who we are, where we belong in the world.

When you take those things away you are taking things away, things that are fundamental. When I say it's the bank as well, ceremony also functions to allow people to do certain things. For example, it's very often the case that until young men have been through certain ceremonies, they're not allowed to marry. There's a real economy there that allows older people to control younger people and to guide them through the economic and the social institutions of society. If young men in particular are not put through ceremony then they become unruly and antisocial. There is an element of discipline. It's a bit like if kids don't go to school, the way we pass on knowledge, the way that we pass on values, then they become rather scattered and loose, they have no reference points. And I think that in some ways that's part of what has happened with people becoming lost. It's like the ceremony is the crucible where so many things happen, and as you lose those things you lose things that are incredibly fundamental. But for a lot of people, singing and dancing are entertainment, it's what you do on Friday night for fun, it's not what you do to hold your life together.

Gretchen Miller: In Arnhem Land there has not been a forced removal to the missions or surrounding stations as happened widely across Australia. The Yolgnu people at the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture this year spoke of the strength of the unbroken link between Yolgnu clans, their country and the ceremony they've always practiced.

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi: Hello, my name is Dhanggal Gurruwiwi and I'm from the Galpu clan. I live at Nulunbuy which is a mining town in the gulf peninsula.

Djapirri Mununggirritj: Hi everyone, my name is Djapirri Mununggirritj, and I'm a Gumatj person, and I am also a role model for my community..

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi: I guess it's because we're not separated.

Djapirri Mununggirritj: No, because it's a big extended family amongst all the tribes.

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi: Every clan isn't separated. For instance, just an example, I'm a Galpu that's one of the clans, and my grandmother is Rirratjingu, that's another clan from Yirkala. My great-grandmother is Dhalwangu and that's from southern part, and see the connection of the land, and my mother is this place, the Gumatj. So all the clans are connected.

Gretchen Miller: So that means that if you have responsibility for someone else's family then there's less likely, in a practical sense, to be conflict.

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi: You have to do it, that's your responsibility.

Gretchen Miller: You're listening to Encounter on ABC Radio National, and we're discussing the link between traditional ceremony, caring for country, and spiritual, social and individual health in Aboriginal communities.

In the soft darkness before dawn one morning at the Garma Festival, a number of European women joined the Yolgnu women's camp. We walked together silently through the stringybark trees to sit on a point overlooking the coastal plains stretching out to the Gulf of Carpentaria. They're seen to be peopled with the spirits of the ancestors. As we waited for the sun to rise over the sea, the women remembered their dead, and keened. It was too sacred and secret to record, but Djapirri Mununggirritj and Dhanggal Gurruwiwi later told me what it was about.

Djapirri Mununggirritj : The singing that was sung by the Yognu women tells a journey of their pain for the land. Because in our world, Yolgnu and the land are one. Yolgnu began then to sing the journey of our ancestors and our loved ones that have gone before us. It's the time of moment when we feel their presence around us, in this gathering, that enables us Yolgnu women to give us strength and courage to carry on our traditions, our culture, our stories about the land.

Gretchen Miller: Women don't sing in the big ceremonies, is that right? This is the place for women to sing?

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi : That's right, yes. They can't sing in the public for any ceremonies, no. But it's sort of like crying and just to feel that peace, have the peace within them, and to sing, it really makes...like us, sitting around them, quiet and just think of the times we had with the families.

Gretchen Miller: So it's a very private thing for women, to sing.

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi : It is, yes.

Djapirri Mununggirritj : You put it in terms...it's meditating.

Gretchen Miller: Mark Grose, general manager, and Michael Honehan, music director, run Darwin's Skinnyfish Music. A record label and publisher dedicated to Aboriginal music, the business also has a clear community development ethic, based on their long relationships with Aboriginal people. They are advisors to the Galiwinku Healthy Lifestyle Festival, which merges health messages with a celebration of the vibrant rock music history of Elcho Island. For decades they've observed the interconnectedness of ceremony, social and personal health. Mark Grose.

Mark Grose: Again, if you look at communities that have licensed clubs in them, people can tend to cut a ceremony short because the club's opened, whereas in areas where there is no easy access to things like grog it doesn't become an issue, people are there for weeks.

Every time there is a music event in a community, we see that young kids stop sniffing, we see people stop drinking. Now, for us, what we would love to see in terms of music is that there's a greater activity of music at the community level. And the Galiwinku Healthy Lifestyle Festival is part of that, the Barunga Festival, and we're sort of working towards or trying to encourage this grand plan of getting people to support community festivals because if there are enough community festivals, people remain focussed and think, right, next week there's one here so we're going to go there.

Gretchen Miller: But what is the medical evidence of the positive effects on indigenous health, of practicing ceremony, and living on country, on the outstations? Two studies indicate that what is intrinsically known by Indigenous communities would be well supported by further investigation. Dean Yibarbuk from the Wardekan land management program, and GP Paul Burgess made a snapshot of a town and its outstations on the central Arnhem Land plateau.

Paul Burgess: Dean and I both collaborated on a project called Healthy Country: Healthy People, which was a project that ran between 2004 and 2007. And the objective of that program, which Dean actually initiated, was to investigate what the benefits are of people remaining engaged with country and caring for country. And the benefits...we were particularly interested in the human health benefits but also the environmental benefits.

Gretchen Miller: Dean, what made you want to get a project like this going?

Dean Yibarbuk: From the beginning, probably back in the 50s, we know that country was very healthy, and when the country was very healthy, the people was healthy as well. Because of lots of impacts in our community, our people have been impacted as well, and I don't think the country is healthy no more, and the people, the health situation is poor...because once the country is healthy, people are in the environment doing their own things like managing the country, going walkabout, collecting food from out in the wild. That's what makes people really healthy because it's the life they enjoy, out in the bush because everything is just there.

I mean, in the human-made town, in the settlements, people hasn't progressed a healthy life because of all the exotic food we're having, you've got to buy things from the shop. A lot of the food that we eat from the shop has high cholesterols, you know? When hunting out in the natural environment everyone feels that they are more healthy. We have a competition between the exotic food and the natural food.

We're trying to bring our people back in the country where their fathers and their grandfathers...and we're drawing people from town, bringing them back in the bush, give them the opportunity to explore what kind of lifestyle, what sort of health they have in their own homeland. It's a very, very strong tradition, and some people are ready to come back, some people are not ready to come back because of all this education for our children, plus medication and all that. Our country is there still waiting for a people I suppose. And the country needs the people to go back to manage it. When the country is healthy, I'm pretty sure the people will be healthy as well.

Gretchen Miller: Do you have ceremony?

Dean Yibarbuk: Ceremony is part of our lifestyle, I think that we have been practicing for thousands of years, yes. It's always been healthy for our people, it's always been in our blood. The ceremony gives us identity and the power for our people to able to turn, participate, and gather up all the people. That's part of the healthy style, getting all the tribes together and performing ritual and the practices.

Paul Burgess: The study we did that Dean initiated, we looked at caring for country broadly, and one of the components of caring for country that Dean's talked about is ceremony. We spent two years talking with senior land owners in this large community and we identified several caring for country activities; they were using country to gain food or medicinal resources, and burning country, burning the grasses every year. So all those activities involved direct interactions with landscape.

Then we looked at activities that had a more spiritual component, participation in ceremonies was one of those. The other was protecting sacred sites or sacred areas. And the last activity that we identified with our work with land owners was the production of artefacts; carvings, baskets, paintings, which were concrete embodiments of knowledge and of landscapes and telling the story for everybody to see and share.

We then provided checkups for people, preventative health checkups, and looked at their health outcomes compared to the participation against those range of activities. And what we found was very impressive health benefits associated with caring for country. The major causes of premature death and illness in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Australians are diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, obesity. Against every one of those key indicators we found that caring for country was associated with much better health, significantly so and substantially so.

In addition we found people had low stress, we measured psycho-social stress. So I think the simple health story here is that Aboriginal communities I've worked with have volunteered their own health promotion story, and it's a matter of respecting that health promotion story and validating it and saying, yes it's legitimate for the major causes of disease and mayhem in the Aboriginal community. It's a true story and it needs further support. The political climate in the last decade especially has been very much about closing down outstations, calling them unviable and unsustainable, but they're missing out on a very crude analysis of economics, some of the health benefits that brings to Aboriginal people, and also the ecological benefits that brings to our environment.

Dean Yibarbuk: And more and more since we started our work with the Caring for Country program, especially where I work, at Kabulwarnamyo , we're drawing more and more family groups from the community by taking them out for a couple of weeks, go hunting, camping, talking to their spirituality, talking to the whole environment, and they feel relaxed, their body becomes really, really healthy. Once they go back to the town, that's where all the problems begin, because of depression, sadness, impacts, all those sorts of things happen in the community and it's unbalanced sometimes.

Gretchen Miller: Depression and sadness have defined physical effects on people. Paul, when you say that the major health indicators show that there is a marked reduction in diabetes, heart disease and so on, what sort of reduction are you talking about?

Paul Burgess: The major study that has really looked at the question you're interested in is a study conducted in Utopia, which is a collection of outstations about two and a half hours north-east of Alice Springs. As a medical student in 1995 I was fortunate enough to participate in that study gathering data. What that study has shown over 15 years of follow-up is that that community, which is almost entirely outstations, have achieved reductions in cardiovascular deaths and admission to hospital by around 40%.

What we're seeing is less instance, less heart attacks, basically, over time, less admissions to hospital for cardiovascular disease than would be expected looking at Northern Territory or even Aboriginal health statistics across the nation. What that study told us was where better heath outcomes were occurring...Utopia is a place where people have never been taken off country, where they've always maintained their links with country, they're very strong in ceremony, they're very strong in customary foods, and they're very strong in art work. So all the things we're looking at, they have great strength in all of those areas. There are some real synergies between our work in the Healthy Country: Healthy People study and what's been observed at Utopia over 20 years.

Gretchen Miller: And you can find out more about the Utopia study by going to the Encounter website and following the links you'll find there.

Now, at the Garma Festival in Northeast Arnhemland there is a women's healing centre set up for local women and visiting cultural tourists. Based in Yirrkala, the healing centre is run by senior Yolgnu women, including Djapirri Mununggirrtj. It includes a program called Strong Women, Strong Babies, Strong Culture.

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi: The ladies up there have been doing it for a while. I call them the mothers [laughs]. And seeing the impact of everyone in the community, of grog and you name it, and they were concerned about it all. And they came up together, talked about it, and said that it's time for us to do something, step in and do what we have to do to get our...for the sake of our people as well as the children.

Gretchen Miller: So it runs all the time?

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi: It happens all the time back at the community.

Djapirri Mununggirritj : And one of the ones is through my program, Strong Women, Strong Babies, Strong Culture.

Gretchen Miller: Can you tell me about that?

Djapirri Mununggirritj : It's one of the five programs I have inside Women's Resource Centre, is to keep the culture strong, to pass the knowledge to the younger generations, and to continue practicing the practices that need to be continued on, as in healing.

Gretchen Miller: How is this associated with caring for country?

Dhanggal Gurruwiwi: Well, you need to take a look at the real you within you. You are happy living on that land and knowing who you are. If that inner being is healed, it takes care of the body as well.

Amongst the women that took the dawn walk that morning at Garma was Danielle Dyall who's doing a Bachelor of Indigenous Studies at Southern Cross University in Lismore, NSW. I asked her about being an Indigenous woman who did not grow up on country or experience ceremony during her childhood.

Danielle Dyall: What I was saying before about having just that mindfulness, because I think ceremony is in everything, and ritual is just a part of ceremony, its like the 'doing' part of the ceremony. So just being really mindful of what we do and how we do it is the ceremony, life is the ceremony, and being aware of that, then we're being aware of the wellbeing of life and of ourselves. But then when it comes to old traditional ceremonial practices, which are so very important...well, maybe one day I'll be shown some of them, but at the moment I haven't been shown any. So I just make 'em up myself, and the way I do that is by just connecting with myself, just meditating and breathing slowly and speaking to the divine or speaking to the great spirit that's within everything, and just listening to what I'm told to do, with my body, or with my words. To me, ceremony has to evolve to accommodate the new issues that are going on, just like the knowledge needs to change, to accommodate. So I think that it's okay to change and evolve, just as long as there's still that same spirit there.

Gretchen Miller: I wonder how something like that could come about, because you talk about ceremony that you have developed for yourself, personally, but the rituals and ceremonies that we've seen here are for the group.

Danielle Dyall: I'm just young, I'm 28 and I haven't lived in culture, so I can only speak for what I know, but I think just talking with the elders, talking, and it's happening, it happens, the women going to special places, like we've got these amazing tea tree lakes, just talking and discussing what can be done and how can it be done, and creating a ceremony around that, and being able to do the special cleansing thing. I don't know enough, but these are just suggestions that I'm sure can happen.

Tom Calma: Remember that there's over half a million Indigenous people in Australia, only about 30% of those people live in remote areas, the rest live in regional or urban areas. So whatever response we have has to look at the full Aboriginal population.

Gretchen Miller: How can that be addressed in practical terms to bring back practices that are cultural and encourage self-worth?

Tom Calma: There are a number of different ways. One of the big responses...and you recall the Prime Minister made the Apology on the 30th February this year to Aboriginal people who were part of the Stolen Generation, people who were forcibly removed from their community, from their culture, from their language and placed somewhere else. One of the responses to that...and the government has put some money in and there's still pledges for a lot more to go into firstly link-up programs, helping people re-establish links with their family, where they came from or to try and track where they came from. Then once they've tracked that down, looking at reunion programs to help support the family and their kin to go back and re-establish with their family in their home location. So that's an important aspect to it.

Gretchen Miller: So that's a kind of returning to country.

Tom Calma: It's a returning to country, returning to culture, understanding, but it's not always that easy because there's been maybe 30, 40 years...there's people now who are in their 50s, 60s who still don't know where they came from because the records have been lost, they've been placed outside of it. It's very sad, and that has had a fairly significant mental health impact. And so there needs to be more support there. There is support coming in. There's a discussion going on to establish healing centres, because that's going to be important for people to work on their healing. But once we get that established, and we see this in a lot of areas, we see a lot of cultural revival programs, dance programs that people are going through.

Gretchen Miller: Tom Calma. The Garma Festival was notable for the number of teenage and young boys dancing ceremonially, kicking up the sand of the bungul ground each afternoon. By participating, young people are intensively trained, and in learning the movements and songs they keep the tradition alive.

But since the 1960s there's also been a successful rock music tradition in the area, with bands like Soft Sands, Yothu Yindi, Saltwater, and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu all coming from this area. Most band members are also traditional dancers and singers. Manduwuy Yunupingu is from the Gumatj clan. He's Yothu Yindi's lead singer, and it is the Yothu Yindi Foundation that started the Garma Festival of Traditional Music ten years ago. The balance between the contemporary and the traditional relates back to a musical tradition of balance, between the didjeridu, or yidaki, and the singing and the dancing.

Mandawuy Yunupingu: Well, keeping in mind that we don't want to become like the Americans, with the hip hop way...I'm not judging it in a bad way, but it's just one way of making sure that society functions without doing damage to traditional ways of thinking. It's quite easy to run away from traditional ways, and then one day making it bastardised.

Gretchen Miller: How do you manage the balance?

Mandawuy Yunupingu: The balance has been always original. So that original balance is what the ancestor of this place gave my people, the power to play the yidaki, and the singing, expression with the land.

Gretchen Miller: Some communities want to keep the two traditions very separate, and others like to integrate them, as with Saltwater band and Nabarlek, says Michael Honehan, music director of Skinnyfish Music.

Michael Honehan: They take traditional songs and know the melodies and stories of those traditional songs, and then they might totally change that traditional song, but you can feel that full integration. The same with Nabarlek band, and the old men have endorsed that and they actually tell the Nabarlek guys stories to bring out in contemporary music. A lot of the elders here in Arnhem Land now grew up with rock'n'roll, so I think they would see a lot of it as a legitimate form of expression.

Mark Grose: I think one of the big impacts of the Nabarlek style of music on young people is to reinforce that traditional culture has a positive outside of their own world, because one of the great thrills that people from each of those language groups, like the Nabarlek family members, when they see them perform in front of non-indigenous Australians and people love it and love the songs, it's a reinforcement to them that their cultural values are worth something, because they very rarely get that. Their whole lives they're told in subtle ways that what you've got is not good enough, that the western way is the right way.

Gretchen Miller: Without functional outstations, caring for country and practicing ceremony is extremely difficult. Last year the former coalition government handed over responsibility for Indigenous housing to the states. But made explicit in the accompanying Memorandum of Understanding was that no federal funding was to be spent on outstation housing. The new Labor government has not changed this policy, although it says it will financially support Caring for Country initiatives.

However, the Senate Select Committee on Regional and Remote Indigenous Communities made its first report last month. It has a wide ranging brief to investigate the effectiveness of government policies in the wake of the NT intervention, and more generally on the wellbeing of regional Aboriginal communities. And so far it has found critical housing shortages to be the number one issue, impacting negatively on physical and mental health, school attendance, employment capability, substance abuse, violence and child abuse and neglect.

Meanwhile, the imminent introduction of carbon trading offers an economic argument for the active support of outstation living, says GP, Paul Burgess.

Paul Burgess: What our study has shown is that outstations do have this intrinsic value, and what we'll see in coming years is a very big opportunity. We will see a transformation in our economy where we're going to be looking at environmental offsets for carbon, and people in outstations are very well placed through their activities like burning country and keeping country healthy to trade that carbon and to establish sustainable economies in remote areas of Australia. This is a marvellous opportunity for economic development and independence and self-determination and keeping culture strong. The skills are there. Health outcomes would be one of the biggest outcomes here.

Dean Yibarbuk: If had a dollar in my hand, as policy...it's up to each individual, to set up what they need, what their priorities are. I make a plan, every six months during the school semester, and I have a bucket of dollars there, I would take the people out in the bush, walkabout, seeing the country, they feel the country, body talking to the country and the people itself.

Gretchen Miller: So that would be as useful as a dialysis machine, for example?

Dean Yibarbuk: Could be, yeah [laughs]. Because walking out on the country, old people especially, they feel proud, move ten yards, they'll stop and they'll see something very important, they'll start talking about it, telling their kids, 'This tree here, it was here when I was a child.'

Gretchen Miller: It's not just food, is it, it's more than that, it's what roots you to...

Dean Yibarbuk: Yes, spirituality and all that, it's all being connected through the healthy country, healthy process programs, especially the Healthy Country: Healthy People lifestyle. People tend to get stuck sometimes, they get really sad, they got nowhere to move around.

Gretchen Miller: This has been Encounter on ABC Radio National. Thanks to all our guests, to the many performers you heard in the program, and to the Yothu Yindi Foundation. Very special thanks to Sally Treloyn and Allan Marett. The sound engineer today was Michelle Goldsworthy. I'm Gretchen Miller. See you next time.

Mandawuy Yunupingu: In the water, and you feel...the water sends out energy that is part of the earth and the land, and the earth is talking to you, but you're still part of the earth itself. Ceremony is the expression of knowing that form of understanding, it's the centre of spirituality, really, and basically ceremony is part of spirituality. If you don't have a ceremony, you've got no spirituality base, where creation is, spirituality starts, and then end product starts. It's the end product that triggers up the spirituality and the magic to be able to know what is around you.

This document outlines clearly some of the issues around government policy on Aboriginal outstations.See pages 4 and 5 for the relevant reference to the Memorandum of Understanding Between the Australian Government and the Northern Territory Government Indigenous Housing, Accommodation and Related Services September 2007 - which still applies under the new Labor government.